all ur parentheses Я belong to me

Okay, that title was a bit extreme, I don’t really hate Rails. I don’t get why people feel the need to be so completely polarized about a framework, or a language. It’s either the best thing since sliced bread, or the worst, and nowhere in between. Still, most developers who aren’t Ruby purists, can tend to have a love hate relationship with Rails. Rails is easy to develop with, full stop. It’s practically impossible for you not to push out an app in AT LEAST 1/4 of the time it would take in straight up PHP. The problem is, PHP and Rails are apples and oranges, they aren’t the same thing, Rails is a framework built with the Ruby language, PHP is just a language. If you want a comparison, try CakePHP and Rails.

Saying that Rails isn’t as fast as PHP is kind of mind boggling. Rails is slow, and so is ruby, and it will never be as fast as PHP or faster, period. Unless PHP becomes abandoned, which doesn’t seem likely. PHP is 100% geared towards a Server Side Scripting language, from the ground up, it’s written directly into the PHP parser to handle HTML with embedded PHP tags. Ruby is a general purpose scripting language with addon modules for parsing ruby code in HTML, like ERB. Regardless of this, you’d barely notice how much slower it is in reality because at this point, it’s very much a matter of hundredths of a second difference (probably). That barely even matters in large scale apps, because the gains in ease and speed of development pay for the slight slowdown during high traffic or the need to have more servers or better hardware and so on. Bandwidth, storage, and processor cycles are wastable resources, you waste them and get man hours back, man hours cost more than bandwidth hours, so it’s simple math.

Developing with Ruby and Rails means you can pretty much halve your dev team on any project. Unless there’s only one developer, then halving that person is a federal crime that can pull the death penalty.